This book provides a critical discussion of True Crime literature, arguing for the deconstruction of the genre into subgenres that better reflect a work’s contents. In analysing seminal and lesser-known works, the areas of authenticity, accuracy, and author proximity are considered to form a framework on which an individual publication’s subgenre (re)categorisation can be assessed. The book considers the likes of Ann Rule, Truman Capote, and Maggie Nelson, among other notable authors. Their works – those that fit into True Crime and those that defy categorisation within the genre as it exists – are reviewed, and their defining features critiqued. Topics such as narrative methodologies, figurative language, and utilisation of research are considered in support of this. These strands combine to a larger discussion regarding a deconstruction of True Crime, and the ways in which this will improve the social responsibility of the genre, and encourage a more conscientious consumerism of it.

Bringing new research from true crime writers, scholars, and media practitioners around the world, this book offers fresh perspectives on how women read, write, and are portrayed in true crime stories across different platforms, including documentaries, podcasts, and TikToks. The genre of true crime is flourishing, and it is overwhelmingly consumed by women. Despite this, there is much we do not know about how women consume true crime and are represented in true crime stories of various kinds. This edited volume helps to fill this gap in our knowledge. Across ten chapters and using a variety of study methods, including creative practice, interviews, surveys, archival research, and case studies, the book reveals the multifaceted ways that true crime matters to women and suggests areas of future research. It also offers new insights on a diverse range of topics, such as racial identities, fraudsters, activism, victimisation, and deviance, as well as highlighting major cases from past to present which have influenced criminal justice responses. True Crime and Women is intended for researchers and students of criminology, literary studies, gender studies, media and journalism studies, and rhetorical studies, as well as media practitioners and writers.

What is organized crime? There have been many answers over the decades from scholars, governments, the media, pop culture and criminals themselves. These answers cumulatively created a "Mafia Mystique" that dominated discourse until after the Cold War, when transnational organized crime emerged as a pronounced, if nebulous, threat to global security and stability. The authors focus both on the American experience that dominated organized crime scholarship in the second half of the 20th century and on the more recent global scene. Case studies show that organized crime is best understood not as a series of famous gangsters and events but as a structure of everyday life formed by numerous political, social, economic and anthropological variables. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

2017 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Runner-Up One of the most recognizable young poets in America, Olivia Gatwood dazzles with her tribute to contemporary American womanhood in her debut book, New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.

A People Best Book of Summer A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives. July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved. Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circumstances of Paula’s life, the more parallels she saw in the lives of the women who knew Paula and the women in Paula’s family, in the lives of the women in Dykstra’s own family, and even in her own life. Captivating and expertly crafted from interviews with Paula’s family and friends, police reports, and on-the-scene investigation, What Happened to Paula is part true crime story, part memoir, a timely and powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.

EDGAR AWARD FINALIST • A private investigator revisits the case that has haunted her for decades and sets out on a deeply personal quest to sort truth from lies. CLUE AWARD FINALIST • “[A] haunting memoir, which also unfolds as a gripping true-crime narrative . . . This is a powerful, unsettling story, told with bracing honesty and skill.”—The Washington Post A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • One of Marie Claire’s Ten Best True Crime Books of the Year Ellen McGarrahan was a young journalist for The Miami Herald in 1990 when she witnessed the botched execution of convicted killer Jesse Tafero: flames and smoke and three jolts of the electric chair. When evidence later emerged casting doubt on Tafero’s guilt, McGarrahan found herself haunted by his fiery death. Had she witnessed the execution of an innocent man? Decades later, McGarrahan, now a successful private investigator, is still gripped by the mystery and infamy of the Tafero case, and decides she must investigate it herself. Her quest will take her around the world and deep into the harrowing heart of obsession, and as questions of guilt and innocence become more complex, McGarrahan discovers she is not alone in her need for closure. For whenever a human life is taken by violence, the reckoning is long and difficult for all. A rare and vivid account of a private investigator’s real life and a classic true-crime tale, Two Truths and a Lie is ultimately a profound meditation on truth, grief, complicity, and justice.